At present, Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technologies and mobile communication technologies have been widely used. Many comprehensive operators are operating these two networks at the same time. However, these two types of networks have vast differences in operating mechanisms and authenticating mechanisms, the operator usually needs two different sets of subscriber management, authentication, accounting and service provision methods. Therefore, how to integrate these two types of networks together and realize uniform authentication, authorization, and accounting has become a hot research topic in the field of network communications.
For a WLAN network, identification and authentication of a subscriber identity generally relies on a unique account number and a corresponding password. A subscriber needs to input an account number and a corresponding password into an IE browser. Then, an Authentication/Authorization/Accounting (AAA) server identifies and authenticates the identity of the subscriber. For a mobile communication network, identification and authentication of a subscriber identity relies on a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card. Each SIM card identifies a unique identify of the subscriber, that is, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI). Therefore, a SIM card subscriber does not need to manually input an account number and a password. Instead, only the unique IMSI identification is required to complete the authentication process. Therefore, it is an ideal solution that the WLAN network can apply the current mechanism of using SIM for authentication to its own authentication system without the manual input of an account number and a password by the user to implement uniform authentication, authorization and accounting for the two types of networks.
In the conventional art, to achieve the above objective, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) presents a SIM card authentication technology-based extensible authentication protocol (hereinafter, referred to as the EAP-SIM protocol). Theoretically, through this protocol, the WLAN network realizes completing the authentication by borrowing the SIM card.
Although the EAP-SIM protocol may theoretically realize SIM card-based authentication for the WLAN network, in practice, there are many disadvantages. Since the EAP-SIM protocol is situated at the relatively lower “network layer” in the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model, and the PC operating system has already been provided with the TCP/IP protocol stack, to realize EAP-SIM in the operating system of a PC, it is necessary to complete data interaction between the TCP/IP protocol layer and the “network layer” of the OSI model. However, the data interaction is extremely complex and is hard to implement technically. In addition, to realize the EAP-SIM protocol, a WLAN operator has to provide the subscriber with access points (APs) capable of transparently transmitting EAP-SIM messages, that is, the original APs of the WLAN network need to be modified.